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Jon Wright had planned on a career in music, but instead found his livelihood in financing hotels. As the founder and CEO of Atlanta-based Access Point Financial, Wright leads a team of industry veterans in hospitality finance, supporting mortgages, new developments and renovations.
Growing up with a love of music inspired by his father (who he describes as being like the protagonist from “Mr. Holland’s Opus”) and his brother Mark, a songwriter/producer and current president of Show Dog-Universal Music, Wright originally had planned to spend his life creating songs. After graduating from the University of Arkansas, Wright followed his brother to Nashville to gain experience in the music industry, but needed a day job to pay the bills. He began training at the Ford Motor program for a role in junior management in its asset-based lending group, and soon was working in the company’s corporate real estate and asset-backed securities division, financing the “contents” of real estate—“everything but the land and building,” he said. In this role, he developed a taste for the financing industry—and for meeting the heads of corporate finance departments within large institutional corporations.
After four years, he was invited to interview with Holiday Inn Worldwide in Memphis. “Kemmons Wilson, the founder of Holiday Inn, had pioneered an in-house finance company called General Innkeepers Acceptance Corporation,” Wright said. The franchise industry was becoming very competitive, and Wilson wanted to jumpstart his “dormant” company by...